Utility lines, such as lines for telephones, electricity distribution, natural gas, cable television, fiber optics, Internet, traffic lights, street lights, storm drains, water mains, and wastewater pipes, are often located underground. Utility lines are referred to as “buried assets” herein. Consequently, before excavation occurs in an area, especially an urban area, an excavator is typically required to clear excavation activities with the proper authorities and service providers. The clearance procedure usually requires that the excavator contact a central authority (such as “One Call”, “811” and “Call Before You Dig,” which are well known in the art) which, in turn, sends a notification to the appropriate utility companies. Subsequently, each utility company must perform a buried asset detection procedure, which includes having a field technician visit the proposed excavation site, detecting the relevant buried assets and physically marking the position of the buried asset using temporary paint or flags.
Usually, a technician visiting a proposed excavation site utilizes a portable electronic device known as a pipe or cable locator, which may be a commercial, off-the-shelf, two-part receiver/transmitter kit that is employed to detect and identify the position of the buried assets. This is typically achieved by connecting the transmitter part to a suitable connection point (i.e., pedestal, hydrant, manhole, removable cover, lid, junction box or other access point) of the buried asset, wherein the transmitter sends a signal of a specific frequency onto the buried conductor. Subsequently, the receiver device is “tuned” to the specific frequency in order to locate the resulting electromagnetic signal radiating from the buried conductor, thus enabling the position and route of the buried pipe/cable to be marked with paint or flags above surface.
The aforementioned procedure, however, takes time and effort because the technician must find the correct and optimal place to connect the portable transmitter to the connection point of the buried asset being sought. This entails looking for places where conductors, pipes, cables or ducts are accessible from the surface and then connecting the portable transmitter to said point. Often, the technician may spend a significant amount of time looking for the portable transmitter hookup or access point among grass, trees, bushes, under asphalt, on utility poles, and other conductors, pipes, cables and wires. Once the transmitter has been connected, the field technician will not know for sure that this is the correct point of connection until the buried asset has been successfully located with the receiver. Frequently, the transmitter must be relocated and reconnected to a different connection point before the technician finds the optimal or correct connection point.
Utility companies and are faced with increasing requests to locate and mark the position of their buried assets to avoid damage from third party excavators, contractors and underground horizontal boring operations. Locating the same particular buried asset is often performed on the same tract of land but at different times, with weeks, months or years between subsequent locate operations. However, there is currently no way for a locate technician performing a subsequent locate procedure to capitalize or utilize previous locate procedure knowledge to facilitate the current locate procedure at hand. Further, it is common for one field technician to locate multiple buried asset types in the same geographic vicinity (i.e., water, gas, electric and telecom services). The invention describes how to record and match the type of utility being located with the corresponding and various portable transmitter connection points.
Presently, the inability to use previous locate data to facilitate a current locate procedure can increase the likelihood of erroneous locate data being logged. As such, this leads to increased costs for utility companies and service providers, as well as potential safety hazards to workers and the general public.
Therefore, a need exists for improvements over the prior art, and more particularly for more efficient methods and systems for logging and recalling data gathered during a buried asset locate procedure.